Frédéric Masson

“ In your home you found an uncle recently graduated from the École Polytechnique. What a prestige surrounds these young men who, by a mental effort which is sometimes excessive, succeed in obtaining the first places in their generation, and to how many mistaken choices of vocation does their example lead! But with you, sir, the vocation had nothing to do with example; you were predestined to mathematics! ”

“ Your name, going out beyond the narrow circle where your work can be appreciated, has become illustrious and added to a nation's glory, and this fame you owe only to yourself; it is the gift of no one, you have followed no master, you belong to no school, you are yourself—and that is enough. ”

“ I do not imagine that violent sports ever tempted you, or that you ever became skilful in them. Nevertheless, you learned to hunt very large game. As soon as you learned to read, your curiosity was excited by those books of popular science which have replaced fairy stories in realistic schemes of education. ”

“ Between creatures which have really lived and of which we know nothing and never shall know anything, except that they lived, and beings which have lived only in the dreams of humanity, but which in the course of the ages have gratified us with so much beauty, grace and poetry, which are the more real, which bring more of light, of consolation, of joy? ”

“ You have read Sully-Prudhomme's verses entitled "Repentance." In them he confesses the error into which the generosity of his heart had drawn him and in which the fallacious discourses of the rhetoricians had maintained him; in order to carry out designs which were unworthy and shameful, these gentry resort to sonorous words to lull a careless people to security; and when the nation awakens and finds herself rolling into the abyss, she cries out treason but is unable to distinguish the traitors. So Sully-Prudhomme had detested war and shown himself rather disdainful of soldiers. ”

“ He was one of those men who, having been led by a noble curiosity into the most emotional and uncertain of professions, practise it with admirable disinterestedness and hold themselves amply repaid if they are so fortunate as to save a human life now and then. ”

“ Your method was to classify the results established, to study their connections, with no care for the demonstrations, sure of finding others, if you happened to forget the ones which they had employed; at the time of your entrance examination, did you not find a new solution for a problem which had been set you? When you worked, you did not remain in your room, but gave your brain a promenade through the corridors, and in place of a pen, a pencil or a piece of chalk, your hand was busy with a bunch of keys—your opener of ideas. ”

“ For the honor of the nation, there are many of the sort in France; but few have been able, like Dr. Poincaré, to discharge the duties of so absorbing a profession, to work in the laboratory, to teach assiduously, and at the same time to travel extensively over Europe.
Your mother was one of those alert, active women, always in motion and always busy, whose spirit of order, organization and command rules a household. She also was a native of Lorraine, of an old local family, home-loving, attached and riveted to the soil ”

“ Then he learned from his own experience that any one who chooses can not be a soldier, that it is one thing to deliver philosophic harangues and another to submit one's physical and moral being to monotonous regulations and entire self-effacement ”

“ Nothing would survive the rudeness of the blows you are dealing if you did not stop from time to time to banter your victims, or if^ seized with a sort of remorse, you did not amuse yourself by gluing together again the members you have broken. ”